Christmas has arrived early at DV, and this video clip is our gift to you! Our friend Professor Vince Gaffney of the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity at Birmingham talks about Doggerland, the lost landscape under the North Sea.
An amazing but little-known fact for most people is that until about 6,500 years ago, the area of the southern North Sea was actually dry land. It was inhabited by hunter-gatherers, who roamed across the area stretching from Yorkshire to Denmark.
Global warming, the end of the Ice Age, and rising sea levels meant that this landscape was swallowed by the North Sea over time, and lost to knowledge….until the Doggerland project.
Using data collected by the oil industry, the team set out to map this lost landscape. The results have been stupendous, with over 23,000 square kilometres surveyed. That’s an entirely new prehistoric country, complete with rivers, hills, lakes, and marshes, as well as models of where the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers may have lived.
Read more about Doggerland!
The Doggerland project is one of the most important and largest projects of its kind in the world, and has a special significance for Flag Fen.
The Flag Fen basin would have been the high-water mark for the North Sea in the Mesolithic, and it’s not hard to imagine the hunter-gatherers coming to settle not far away in their journey away from rising waters. The building of the causeway and platform at Flag Fen was a response to the eventual inundation of this landscape – and thus, the settlers would have had to move on again, in search of dry land.
We’re thrilled that Vince stopped by Flag Fen this summer to share his work at Doggerland with our Venturers in person. Enjoy!
Archaeology in your inbox?!
Want to join a dig? Learn more about archaeology? Join our email list for a monthly digest of our most popular stories, plus alerts for any digs, events, or courses you can join.
Join the list
Written by Brendon Wilkins
As Founder and Co-CEO of DigVentures, Brendon brings together two decades of commercial archaeology experience with his expertise in digital innovation for archaeological fieldwork, public participation, and social impact evaluation. With a consistent research and publication record, his PhD (‘Digging the Crowd: the future of archaeology in the digital and collaborative economy’) explores new business and social impact models that position citizen science as a response to economic and climatic challenges facing humanity. Brendon steers the ship of DV’s fieldwork, evaluation and ‘Deep Time’, our crowdscience platform training citizens to search Earth Observation Data for cultural and natural heritage. Brendon’s signature laugh lights up every room, especially when he sneaks onto the turntables for a cheeky DJ set!
There are no comments on this post yet. Be the first!